"Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience —and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action,"
CONTENT MARKETING INSTITUTE
Experienced sales professionals recognize that if you are not engaged in a substantive conversation with the customer you will not have much influence on the customer’s value definition. If you have not been engaged you will not likely have the knowledge of the customer’s business required to reduce the resources the customer would otherwise invest in creating a solution. You are headed to Column B along with the other competitors who also engaged the customer too late in their buy cycle.
The challenge is that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The perceived value and relevancy of a content piece is completely dependent upon what the prospect is looking for. What issues are they trying to resolve? What results are they trying to achieve? Effective content delivery, optimizes the customer’s ability to touch the prospect with content that is valuable and relevant to the prospect. This facilitates the creation of sales conversations early in a prospect’s buying journey which results in increasing the sales qualified leads in the pipeline and ultimately an increase in close rates.
It is absolutely essential for sales teams to engage early. Providing the customer with content that is relevant, informative, educational, and persuasive is mandatory if early engagement is to be achieved. Early engagement happens when your content generates sufficient resonance with the customer that they are willing to engage with your sales team.
All prospects will have a number of resonance points. Assuming your marketing team understands this reality and are busy creating a content inventory that is capable of facilitating early sales engagement; how do you deliver it?